


Ghosts We Keep Within

by ancestrallizard



Category: Persona 4, Persona Series
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Mystery, Sort of? lot of Dojima being confused
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 12:05:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17580506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancestrallizard/pseuds/ancestrallizard
Summary: The Dojima household gains two new inhabitants, one unbeknownst to Dojima.





	Ghosts We Keep Within

Whether born with the inherent talent or not, years of dedication and experience on the job had honed Ryotaro Dojima’s deductive skills to a fine point. He was good at his job, and he knew he was good at his job. 

But even he was constrained by the laws of a rational universe. He could only theorize and predict things he thought were within the realm of possibility. 

This is what he tells himself for a long time afterwards, to ease the sting of not realizing what was going on in his own house. 

Exhaustion may have also played a role. Dojima was already tired when his nephew, a quiet, polite, and nervous young man, moved in with them, and the murder case that broke soon after kept him busy most of the year. He let it pull him away from his home and monopolize his attention completely. Someone could have flipped every piece of furniture in the house upside-down and it would have taken him a day or two to realize anything had changed. 

Even then some of the happenings were enough to pierce the haze of distraction surrounding him, even if he couldn’t lock on to the cause at the time. 

The first of the signs was the noises.

Dojima returned home late most of that year, usually hitting the futon and passing out almost instantly. But the few times he lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling and thinking about the case or Chisato, he heard things. Floor boards creaking, twinges in the wall, all the typical noises of a house settling its bones at night. 

But there were other things too. Precise floorboard creaks, like someone walking. Objects being scraped, like something was brushing past them. When Dojima woke at night to use the bathroom, a leaden gut feeling told him that they were not alone in the house, that there was someone else downstairs.

But the locks were always secure, nothing valuable ever went missing, and Souji and Nanako were always resting undisturbed. 

The second was the broken dishes.

A few weeks after Souji moved in with them, Dojima was reading over papers at the table in a rare peaceful moment when something shattered by the sink. He’d looked up quickly, afraid that Chisato’s mug had broken, only to see Souji, flushed with embarrassment and standing over a broken plate. 

It happened a few more times after that. Sometimes Dojima was present for it, but more often than not he found ceramic shards later in the garbage. 

He wondered if it was circumvented rage at being forced to move to a small town from the city – Did teenagers do that? Break plates when they were angry? Was Nanako eventually going to do it too? – But if that were the case, his nephew was an incredible actor. Souji profusely apologized every time it happened. Each time more of Dojima’s attention was preoccupied with why he was apologizing so much for a harmless mistake that he never thought about how Souji was always standing away from the dishes when they broke.

His nephew bought plastic cutlery. The crashes of breaking ceramic were replaced by the ‘tinks’ of cheap plastic hitting the floor. It tapered off, until nothing was dropped at all, plastic or ceramic. 

It was as if that were the final barrier to Souji readjusting to his new living space. He doubled his chore workload after that, getting as much done as two people combined. It was hard to believe he had time for it, when he was already so busy with his friends and school. 

Dojima was as grateful for the extra work done around the house and burden lifted from his daughter’s shoulders as he was ashamed to foist so much onto another child. It was a well-worn shame, one he had tracked down and acknowledged but probably wouldn’t do anything to fix. 

The third clue came from Nanako, albeit indirectly. 

With Dojima’s nephew taking on the extra workload, Nanako was free to act more like the child she still was. He started to see her books, toys, art on table and shelves when he returned from work in the late evening. It reminded him forcefully of how things used to be, to the point that sometimes he half expected Chisato to come walking around a corner, greeting him and asking how his day had gone. 

One night he returned exceptionally late. The other occupants of the house had long since gone to bed. He almost went straight to bed before glimpsing a small pile of drawings among his papers at the kitchen table. 

They were Nanako’s drawings, crafted with a mixture of crayon, colored pencil, and markers. Some were of other children, probably her friends, some were of the stray cats Souji was feeding, some were of Souji, and there was even one of Dojima that made his throat feel tight. 

The last drawing gave him pause. It’s another picture of Souji, but there was something standing behind him. A thin, oddly shaped figure messily filled in with black and grey, except for two yellow spots on its nondescript face.

Strange, to be sure. But it was just a child’s drawing, so it didn’t register as suspicious at the time.

The truth revealed itself months and months later, after revelations and betrayal and after a black hole of terror and grief nearly ripped him apart. After he nearly thought the last shreds of his heart were gone forever. 

He was so grateful that Nanako survived that he barely believed it, at first. Even after things settled down, sometimes he limped through the hall at night and was still as he passed their bedrooms, listening to the faint sounds of them asleep through the doors, afraid that if he stopped paying attention again for even a second she’d disappear for good.

It was as he did this one night that he heard strange noises from downstairs again.

_Tap. Tap. Tap._

Like something was hitting the glass. 

Images of new faceless kidnappers flashed through his mind. 

He still wasn’t in any condition to fight. All the same, Dojima rushed down the stairs as well as he could. He threw the light switch and scanned the room for any murderers or kidnappers. He uncurled his fists and relaxed a fraction when he found the source of the noise. 

A figure crouched in front of the sliding door, tapping and tracing circles in the glass for a black and white cat on the other side. 

Dojima didn’t know why Souji was doing this now and not in the morning. Maybe he couldn’t sleep either. 

As he approached his nephew, fragments of information coalesced in his sleep and medicine addled brain. Those being: 

1) Souji was dressed in a long overcoat. As far as Dojima knew, he did not own a long overcoat.

2) He also wore a long white headband. Souji didn’t own one of those either.

3) The taps on the window were not the sound of a finger on glass – its sharper, pointed, like a knife scraping across the pane.

4) The back is too broad to be his nephew’s, shaped and tapered unnaturally, inhumanly.

5) When the cat ran away, the figure straightened out to face the disturbance, and it was taller than Souji, taller than Dojima, and it stared down at him with spots of bright yellow light streaming through the slots in its metal mask, and reached put with iron claws.

All of which led him to the brilliant deduction, seconds before he fell to the floor, that this was probably not his nephew. 

=

He requested coffee, despite the early hour. What he truly wanted was a stiff drink, but he he’d been trying to cut back on alcohol. 

Souji stood beside the table, glance darting from his uncle to the masked spirit and back. 

He’d accepted the otherworldly goings-on in Inaba Souji told him about, for the most part, but the physical evidence of it staring at him from beside his coffee pot was making it all far too real again. 

Souji carefully took a seat beside his uncle. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for him to scare you. I told you everything before, I thought you knew.”

“I know,” Dojima conceded. “I just didn’t think that ‘everything’ would include…” he trailed off, unsure of how to address the thing that hovered in his peripheral vision. “Is it you? Or, haunting you?”

A steaming cup of coffee appeared at his right. “Thanks, Souji,” He said automatically, before realizing that his nephew still sat beside him. It was the spirit, offering the cup with odd, clawed hands.

He took the cup. The spirit – Persona, Souji had said they were called – backed away. It and Souji exchanged glances before it vanished in a curl of mist, like fog dissipating under the sun. 

His nephew sighed. “Sort of both? It’s complicated. Izanagi acts by himself sometimes, but we’re still connected. I feel what he feels, and we can communicate with each other. That’s how I woke up. You scared him and he called out to me.” 

Dojima spluttered into his coffee." _I_ scared- ?”

Souji flinched. Dojima swallowed down his surprise and finished the gulp of coffee. It was prepared perfectly. “So, he was the one who broke the dishes?”

Souji nodded, staring down at the table. “They were accidents. He wanted to help with chores. It took awhile for him to be able to lift objects without phasing through them.”

“Hm.” At least it didn’t try to lift anything even more fragile. “So, why can I see him now?”

“I don’t know.” His nephew’s shoulders hunched further, eyebrows furrowed in concern. Dojima belatedly realized that his nephew looked scared half to death, though he didn’t understand why. 

He slowly, gently put a hand on his shoulder. “Souji, it’s fine. This really isn’t any trouble.”

And it wasn’t. Izanagi fit into his broken, uneven life as well as Souji had. It never directly interacted with him, and Dojima made no forays to interact with it either. Sometimes Dojima spotted it doing chores alongside Souji, or sitting in front of the TV with Nanako. His daughter often talked with the thing, about her day at school or about whatever program was on, and it nodded along, ever the attentive listener. 

He glimpsed it when he returned from work and finally understands the noises he’d been hearing. The apparition moved freely from Souji when he slept, clockwise around the house, checking doors and windows in a looping pattern. The nightly patrols and the safety they inspired habituated him to the spirit more than anything else.

That he was under no obligation to make any faltering attempts at guidance or parenting towards it also helped. 

He broke his self-imposed silence a few days before Souji was scheduled to return home. (Dojima had told Souji, repeatedly, that he could come back to Inaba whenever he wanted, could stay longer if he wanted, because no one should ever have such a look of resignation and dread cloud their face when they thought of home, but ever time he brought it up Souji just repeated that he had to go). 

His nephew and daughter were outside, he was at the table with papers from a new case, and Izanagi lingered by the sink, washing dishes. 

Dojima occasionally looked up through the window. He watched what he came so close to loosing, more times than he probably knew. 

After the last dish was put away, Dojima said, “Thank you.” 

Izanagi stopped. It tilted its head like a confused animal. 

“You protected him,” He continued, “And you helped save her. You kept them both safe. Thank you.”

The persona was still a moment, before the lights in the mask narrowed, upturned. As its form lost mass and uncurled into mist, he would say that it almost looked like it was smiling.

It disappeared, leaving him alone in the kitchen. The detective finished is coffee, and went outside to join his family.

**Author's Note:**

> I still haven't played Persona 4
> 
> http://ancestrallizard.tumblr.com/
> 
> https://twitter.com/


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